As 2018 nears its end, here are my Top 6 developments in climate & energy policy this year:
Worldwide greenhouse gas emissions increase. Let’s start with the bad news for 2018: emissions are rising like a “speeding freight train,” primarily due to more coal-fired power coming on line for India and China, plus more energy use in the United States. Emissions are expected to increase 2.7 percent in 2018, according to research published by the Global Carbon Project. Meanwhile, a U.N. report in October indicated that the world may have just about a dozen more years to get emissions under control enough to avert disastrous warming. These reports should be concerning to everyone.
Solar PV hits policy and deployment bumps but with long-term growth potential. With declining policy support worldwide, including costly tariffs on solar PV in the U.S., solar PV leaders have seen a downturn in 2018, for the first time in recent memory. Globally, according to the Frost & Sullivan (F&S) report Global Renewable Energy Outlook, 2018, the world saw 90 gigawatts (GW) of new solar installations for 2018, which was a slight year-on-year decrease. Overall though, renewable capacity will see 13.3% annual growth in 2018. The report authors expect global investment in renewable energy for the year to be $228.3 billion, a slight increase of 0.7% over 2017. In the U.S., according to latest industry figures, the third quarter saw installed solar PV capacity experience a 15% year-over-year decrease and a 20% quarter-over-quarter decrease. However, total installed U.S. solar PV capacity is expected to more than double over the next five years. Overall, the picture is concerning but with a potentially positive long-term outlook.
EV sales increase worldwide, with 1 million in the U.S. and the Tesla Model 3 finally unveiled. The chart below tells the largely encouraging story: China leads the pack with 40% of all sales. Here in California, sales just reached half a million, with one million nationwide. Prices continue to fall, and the Tesla Model 3 became the #6 top-selling car in the U.S. in November. Of all the climate change news, this progress on vehicle electrification may be the most hopeful, although we’ll need to see even more rapid deployment over the next decade to get growing worldwide transportation emissions under control.
Electrification of transportation spreads to trucks, buses and scooters. The EV revolution has spread, with cheaper, more powerful batteries now making electric “micromobility” options feasible, such as e-bikes and e-scooters. 2018 was truly the year of the e-scooter, when it comes to city streets. And on the heavy-duty side, companies are unveiling previously unheard of electric models, such as Daimler Trucks North America making the first delivery of an all-electric delivery truck, the Freightliner eCascadia, while the California Air Resources Board last week enacted a new rule requiring transit buses to be all-electric by 2040. All told, it’s a positive development for low-carbon transportation.
Movement to legalize apartments near transit in California and across the U.S. All the electrification we can muster on transportation won’t matter much if we don’t decrease overall driving miles. It’s a particular problem in the U.S., with so many of our major cities built around solo vehicle trips. So it was encouraging to see California attempt to legalize apartments near major transit with Scott Wiener’s failed SB 827 earlier this year (which started a productive conversation) and now a potentially viable version in SB 50. The movement is catching on around the country, as Minneapolis just voted to end single-family zoning. It’s long overdue and our only real hope to decrease driving miles.
Trump rollback proposals increase but face judicial setbacks. Trump’s attack on environmental protections made news all year, particularly his attempted rollback of clean vehicle fuel economy standards. The only bright spot is that many of his regulatory rollbacks are sloppy and getting shot down in the courts, as my colleague Dan Farber noted in a report and recent Legal Planet post. And with Democrats set to control the House of Representatives next month, pro-environment legislators are set to have more negotiating power on everything from the budget to enforcement to policy oversight.
So the trends overall are uneven, with a lot for concern and also promising technology and policy momentum still in effect. 2019 could also greatly change this picture, with a potentially slowing economy and more private sector innovation on clean technology.
Overall, those who care about these issues have a lot to digest and ponder this holiday season, along with the cookies. See you in 2019!
Catastrophic wildfires are primarily a public health and safety threat. But they also affect water quality and supply in ways that many people don’t always appreciate. Specifically, a better managed forest with regular, low-level burns can improve water supply and quality through increased and cleaner runoff.
UC Berkeley research is bearing this dynamic out. As referenced in the video above, students and faculty have been studying the Illilouette Creek Basin, a “bowl of pure Yosemite granite,” which since the 1970s has been exempted from California’s backwards policy of fire suppression. As a result, the area has been allowed to burn regularly, leading to healthy and balanced forest conditions of fewer, bigger trees, more evenly spaced.
The effect has been significant for water flows, as the lead researchers have found:
[F]ire can also be a boon to both local ecosystems and water users far downstream — including humans — largely because fire-thinned forests consume less water and offer more space for meadows and wetlands.
“If you take out deep-rooted trees and you replace them with more shallow-rooted plants like shrubs and grasses, those don’t have access to as much water and they don’t use as much,” [professor of environmental engineering Sally] Thompson explains. “So in the absence of those trees, you’re storing more water in the soils and groundwater, and that leaves the whole system more primed to start creating runoff and streamflow.”
And regular fires also means greater biodiversity. All in all, it’s another strong benefit from managing our forests more responsibly by thinning out excess small trees and allowing natural burns to occur. We need it for safety, the environment — and our increasingly imperiled water supply.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the United Nations yesterday released an alarming report describing the impacts of a 1.5 degree Celsius global temperature increase — and how those impacts are likely to happen sooner than scientists previously anticipated.
KTVU News Channel 2 in the San Francisco Bay Area interviewed me as part of their story on the new report, covering what the findings could mean for the region:
As climate change destroys homes, infrastructure, and sometimes whole settlements, the insurance industry will be on the hook. To address the subject, UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) partnered with the California Department of Insurance (CDI) and Dr. Evan Mills to release Trial by Fire: Managing Climate Risks Facing Insurers in the Golden State.
Trial by Fire offers a comprehensive review of the nature and extent of the risks and opportunities faced by insurers and residents in California.
My colleague and CLEE co-author Ted Lamm has an op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle along with California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones and Dr. Mills to summarize the report’s key findings. The basic policy recommendations include:
Enact more legislation like state Senate bills 894 and 824, both recently signed by the governor, which protect consumers by requiring insurers to offer policy renewals after a declared disaster and enhanced insurer data reporting regarding fire-related issues;
Enact legislation to require insurers’ fire risk models to be evaluated by the Department of Insurance to ensure that they account for the evolving harms of climate change and home- and community-level protective measures to reduce fire risks;
Conduct pilot projects to test the viability of making insurance available for higher-risk homes if the homeowner and community meet strict risk-mitigation standards;
Increase the availability and sale of insurance products that incentivize better fire-defense measures at homes and businesses and emission-reduction efforts; and
Disclose to the public insurers’ fossil fuel holdings, divest from thermal coal holdings, and actively invest in renewable energy and climate-change-mitigating projects.
Climate impacts will only worsen in the coming years. But with these steps, policy makers can help the insurance industry — and the general public — avoid the worst while ideally becoming part of the solution.
Governor Brown today signed SB 100 to put California on a path to achieve a carbon-free electricity grid by 2045. I’ll be interviewing bill author and candidate for U.S. Senate State Senator Kevin De Leon on tonight’s City Visions at 7pm, KALW 91.7 FM.
We’ll also discuss the Global Climate Action Summit this week in San Francisco, hosted by California Governor Jerry Brown. The Summit will highlight achievements from around the world as policymakers, businesses leaders and grassroots organizations share the ways they’re working together to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Joining me in the studio will be:
Sen. Kevin de León – California State Senator representing District 24 in Los Angeles
Secretary Matthew Rodriquez – California Secretary for Environmental Protection
Louise Bedsworth – Executive Director for the California Strategic Growth Council
This show will be the first of a three-part series on California’s groundbreaking clean energy policies and the fight against climate change. Tune in with your questions! You can also live-stream or listen to a recorded version of the show afterwards.
Climate change presents a wide range of risks to California’s insurance industry, as Californians across the state contend with unprecedented wildfires, changing storm patterns, increased risks of flooding and sea level rise, and disruptions to business from agriculture to fisheries and beyond. Potential decarbonization of the economy and litigation based on climate-related damages further threaten the insurance business model. The industry faces these dynamic challenges at the same time that insurance products are becoming more necessary but less available and affordable.
To tackle these issues, the California Department of Insurance (CDI), under the leadership of Commissioner Dave Jones, has spearheaded efforts to drive insurers to disclose climate risks, divest of fossil fuel-related investments, and maintain access to insurance in vulnerable areas.
Today, CDI and Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE), together with lead author Dr. Evan Mills, released Trial by Fire: Managing Climate Risks Facing Insurers in the Golden State, a comprehensive report documenting the nature and extent of the risks and opportunities faced by insurers and residents in California. The report covers:
CDI’s landmark efforts to date;
Physical, transition, and liability risks;
Challenges to insurance affordability, adequacy, and availability;
The opportunities presented by “green” insurance products;
Potential legislative and policy reforms; and
Solutions for industry, regulators, and consumers to preserve a viable insurance industry in a changing climate.
Many of the points covered in the report also dovetail with a June 2018 CLEE-hosted symposium with stakeholders across California’s insurance and climate regulatory communities. Building from this symposium and CDI’s ongoing climate change initiatives, Trial by Fire documents the challenges faced by an industry essential to the fight against climate change and provides a roadmap for California leaders seeking to engage and support it.
Video of Commissioner Dave Jones’ press conference this morning announcing 2018 wildfire insurance loss data and the release of the report is available here.
CDI’s press release announcing the report is available here.
Could climate deniers be more likely to change their minds if they are told of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change? My guess would be no, as the issue has become one of tribalism and identity that transcends fact-based analyses.
But researchers from Yale University, University of Cambridge, University of California Santa Barbara, and Utah State University appear to have found that messaging on the scientific consensus actually can make a difference in opening minds. They published their results in the journal Nature, describing the perception conundrum:
[D]espite the fact that over 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening, only 11% of the US public correctly estimate the scientific consensus on climate change as higher than 90%.
Using a national survey, the researchers buried questions about climate change among other issues, prompting some respondents with information about the scientific consensus but not others (the control group). The top line finding?
Exposing the survey respondents to the message about the scientific consensus increases their perception of the scientific norm by 16.2 percentage points on a 100-point scale.
So messaging about the consensus may be helpful after all for climate advocates.
But the results were not uniform across the country:
We find the largest messaging effects in states with the lowest pre-treatment belief in the scientific consensus, such as West Virginia, Wyoming and North Dakota. States with more pro-climate publics (for example, California and Hawaii) have some of the lowest effect sizes, because respondent’s initial estimates of the consensus were substantially higher than those in more conservative states…
So basically, the messaging on the scientific consensus worked best in places where climate deniers had little prior exposure to information about climate science. As a result, advocates could use this information to tailor climate communications in those parts of the country especially.
The battle to win “hearts and minds” on climate science will probably take some combination of additional extreme weather events, business and other elites signaling acceptance to their climate denier “tribes,” and generational/population shifts. But every little bit of framing assistance, such as discussed in this study, can surely help in the meantime.
E&E news [paywalled] recently tackled the subject of evolving climate science. Reporter Chelsea Harvey examined the five assessment reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was established in 1988 by the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization.
The UN tasked the IPCC with assessing the risks from climate change by using the most up-to-date scientific and technical information. The five IPCC reports since 1988 have grown increasingly complex, with the latest published in 2014 (the sixth is due in 2022).
The bottom line over 30 years? The big picture forecast of climate warming, covering a broad range of potential temperature rise, remains the same:
[M]ajor uncertainties about climate sensitivity remain, even though estimates of its value are largely the same as they were in the 1990s. The First and Fifth assessment reports both suggest that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 C.
But the IPCC has been too conservative on some specific topics, like sea level rise:
The First Assessment Report suggested that sea levels would likely rise by about 65 centimeters by the end of the century, under a business-as-usual trajectory, “mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice.” By the Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, scientists were projecting up to a meter of sea-level rise by the end of the century under a business-as-usual scenario.
Even in the few years since, multiple studies have suggested that the IPCC’s estimates may be too low, taking into account improvements in scientists’ understanding of the physical processes affecting the world’s ice sheets. Some scientists expect the projections reported in the Sixth Assessment Report will be even higher.
And the IPCC underestimated how much warming has already occurred since 1880:
[W]hile the First Assessment Report estimated that global temperatures have warmed by between 0.3 and 0.6 degree Celsius in the past century, the Fifth Assessment Report honed this estimate to about 0.85 C since 1880.
The science has also improved in terms of modeling capability and ability to forecast impacts in specific parts of the globe, as well as attribute particular weather events to climate change with more precision.
Clearly the science over the past 30 years has been too conservative in some respects, which should give us even more motivation to take action on climate. We’ll need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as we can through clean technology deployment, while preparing for the now-unavoidable impacts to come.
We know that city dwellers have a smaller carbon footprint that suburbanites. But now we have a real case study with carbon measurements to document the phenomenon.
14 scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Utah and several other universities set up a network of carbon dioxide sensors across Salt Lake City and its suburbs. The Washington Post reported on the results:
As suburbs have expanded southwest of Salt Lake City over the last 10 years, carbon dioxide emissions have spiked…
It’s the latest indication that suburban expansion takes an environmental toll, with people driving greater distances and building larger homes that use more energy for heating and cooling.
Similar population growth in the center of Salt Lake City didn’t take the same toll, according to the research. Carbon dioxide emissions in the city center were already higher than in nonurban places. But as the population there grew by 10,000 people, the emissions didn’t increase further.
It’s yet more evidence that encouraging urban growth is one of the most important steps we can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And it’s also a reason why supposedly “environmental” organizations like Sierra Club California that oppose pro-infill measures like SB 827 are actually damaging the environment by doing so.
Cape Town, South Africa, a city of about 4 million people, is just three months away from having to shut down their water supply for residents, barring rain between now and then. Residents will then have to line up at 200 sites around the city to pick up a ration of 6 gallons of water per day per person.
How did this major city, which ironically won an international award for water conservation at the Paris UN climate talks in 2015, end up in this situation? Climate change-induced drought, a growing population, and poor planning are the major culprits. As Warren Tenney from Arizona Municipal Water Users Associationexplained:
Cape Town’s reservoirs are drying up. There is no precedent in their records for three consecutive years this dry. The extreme drought is compounded by a 79 percent growth in population since 1995, while water storage capacity increased only 15 percent. Plans for developing new water supplies, including a desalination plant, are behind schedule. Steps were not taken early enough to head off this slow-moving disaster. Cape Town is now trying to catch up by lowering water pressure in its distribution system and investing in a far-reaching public information campaign to conserve water. These actions have helped to cut the city’s daily water consumption by 45 percent. If Cape Town can reduce consumption yet another 25 percent, they may make it to the rainy season that is supposed to begin in May – if the drought eases and it rains.
Cape Town’s situation should be particularly alarming for California and other parts of the American West that only get rain during winter seasons. Cape Town has a Mediterranean climate like California with long dry spells, plus a similar agricultural industry. Climate change is already contributing to major droughts on the West Coast, and our growing population could one day face Day Zero conditions as well.
What can be done? The obvious step is to encourage as much water conservation as possible, and use recycled wastewater as much as possible as well. Secondarily, we need to be smarter about our groundwater usage and ensure that we leave enough groundwater in our aquifers as possible (California’s 2014 groundwater legislation is for the first time spurring needed management of this resource here). And finally, we’ll need to explore options to boost supplies through desalination. But this costly and potentially polluting step should be a last resort, after conservation and recycling measures (my Berkeley Law colleague Mike Kiparsky is featured in this Wired article explaining the drawbacks of desalination).
These steps may help other jurisdictions avoid a Day Zero scenario — but for how long? As climate change takes us into unprecedented weather changes, even these actions may not be enough. But that’s no excuse for not trying or not planning.
Ethan's book Railtown covers the history of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system.
Railtown presents the history of this system by drawing on archival documents, contemporary news accounts, and interviews with many of the key players to provide critical behind-the-scenes accounts of the people and forces that shaped the system.
Tales from California
Purchase or download Ethan's second album of acoustic rock songs.
China leads the pack with 40% of all sales. Here in California, sales just reached half a million, with one million nationwide. Prices continue to fall, and the Tesla Model 3 became the 
Governor Brown today signed SB 100 to put California on a path to achieve a carbon-free electricity grid by 2045. I’ll be interviewing bill author and candidate for U.S. Senate State Senator Kevin De Leon on tonight’s City Visions at 7pm, KALW 91.7 FM.
Cape Town, South Africa, a city of about 4 million people, is just three months away from having to shut down their water supply for residents, barring rain between now and then. Residents will then have to line up at 200 sites around the city to pick up a ration of 6 gallons of water per day per person.
